April 02, 2016

As nearly always, we have a "how do you romanize that name" issue with character names. In this series in some ways it's worse than usual. Often the problem is that the original name was a western word or phrase, converted to kata kana, and then we have to figure out what it was originally. It doesn't help that often the original western term was chosen as a joke.

That was nearly at its worst in "Dog Days", where almost all the female characters were named after European desserts. For instance, Gaul's bodyguard is made up of three girls who are known as Genoise. They are Vert Far Breton, Jaune Clafoutis, and Noir Vinocacao.

So just one from GATE: The red-haired princess of the Empire is Piña Colada. Most of us don't bother with the circumflex because it's a pain, so we write her name "Pina".

As to anti-Americanism, that peaks in episodes 9 and 10 of the first series.

There's a murder mystery by Rex Stout called "The League of Frightened Men" which contains a man who nurses murderous hatred of a number of other men. He turns out to be a successful novelist, and to gain revenge he puts those men in his novels as characters and kills those characters brutally.

GATE contains a number of fictional paybacks like that, mostly in the first series: against the Diet, against Americans, and against gutless politicians in the government. In the second series he gets revenge against the Press too. All of these things relieve grudges the author has apparently been nursing since he was in the army decades ago. It's the biggest flaw in the series. Fortunately, it doesn't pollute the entire thing, just three episodes in the first series and one in the second.

But that's still too many. And even if the director had wanted to remove that, it would have left a monstrous hole in the plot and reduced the entire story to incoherence.

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Also, I hate unsolicited suggestions and advice. (Even when you think you're being funny.)

At Chizumatic, we take pride in being incomplete, incorrect, inconsistent, and unfair. We do all of them deliberately.